Local librarian puts twist on Christmas storytelling

One Biloxi Librarian had to adjust to a new way of telling stories in the age of COVID so she decided to put a South Mississippi twist on telling Christmas stories.

Kelly Derouen has been a librarian for the past seven years. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, she couldn’t have her in-person story times so she decided to reach her audience virtually every week with illustrated stories. “I made a video to replace the story time that I once did with the children at the Downtown Biloxi Library.”

When Christmas came around, she wanted to put a twist on Christmas stories to relate to kids along the Coast. So, she decided to put a local twist on a popular Christmas eve tale ‘Twas the Night before Christmas’ by featuring animals native to the area. Her story is called ‘Twas the Night before Christmas on the Causeway.’ “I made this video because the only southern Christmas story we had was the ‘Cajun Night before Christmas’ so I wanted something a little closer to home for the Gulf Coast.”

To bring the Christmas illustrated story to life, Derouen manually filmed and illustrated each piece “I would draw all the pictures first and usually I would water color the pictures or color them somehow, make copies, and I would put them through a graphics program.”

Derouen says the idea of the story is for children to be able to relate to the animals they see in the story to animals they see on a daily basis. “So, I want them to be able to go out to the beach later and say ‘look that was in the story we just saw’ and connect that way.”